Hi -

it seems that either pkgconfig developed some unfortunate
features in the last months, or that some buildlink3 hack
got lost which made pkg-config as needed.

The problem is appearently that pkg-config always searches
the builtin prefix/lib/pkgconfig path for *.pc files, whether
a PKG_CONFIG_PATH is set or not. So "configure" scripts using
pkg-config to detect the presence of optional libraries will
find pkgs which are deliberately not buildlink'd in.
This seems to be the deeper reason of eg PR pkg/30013.

The pkg-config manpage also mentions a PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR
environment variable which would do what we need, just that
that string is only present in documentation, not in code.

What to do here -- hack pkg-config or build a wrapper?

best regards
Matthias